Iain Burnside’s new play,
apparently ‘conceived over a club sandwich’ taken with Nick Sears, Head of
Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, is focused upon Britten’s Les Illuminations, though with a
stronger emphasis on the poet Arthur Rimbaud than upon the composer himself. In
fact, it darts around quite a bit, between a performance class for young
singers, thus very much ‘at home’ in the RCM, snippets from Rimbaud’s life, and
a few from Britten’s. Correspondence and history are mined without any sense of
pedantry. Quite what it all adds up to remained a little unclear to me; the
effect was in a sense determinedly, if un-theoretically, post-modern. But the
business of artistic creation and re-creation is rarely linear, so the
fragments of history and interpretative wisdom we hear in the singing class suffer
little and arguably gain a form of truth from their interspersal with scenes
from Rimbaud’s ultra-bohemian existence, scenes that take us to Marseilles, Harar
in Abyssinnia, Aden, Mons, London, and Paris. Verlaine comes and foes, even
having a short family scene to himself, with his long-suffering wife, her
mother, and a non-speaking part for the young Achille(-Claude) Debussy at the
piano. Rimbaud’s defiant, excessive non-metropolitan personality – his northern-ness
much commented upon here – contrasts with the diffident young Britten we
glimpse from time to time, Auden and Isherwood attempting to bring him out of himself.
Much is made of poet’s and composer’s sexuality, both in their scenes and in
the class discussion, a running joke provided by one female student whose
comment upon every aspect of the work is that it shows how ‘queer’ the text is.
As a banal coda, she persuades a fellow female student to join her for a Marks
and Spencer ready meal after the class: knowing banality, perhaps, but I am not
sure what it added. Nor was I really convinced that we needed a spoken chorus
of vowels, A, E, I, O, and U during a few of Rimbaud’s scenes; we gained a
commendable sense of his linguistic interests in any case. Nevertheless, at
seventy-five minutes, the play was enjoyable and certainly did not overstay its
welcome.

Students in the performance class

Performances were assured,
both in terms of acting and singing. Indeed for a group of young singers who
are not primarily actors their stage presence was most impressive. (The 'movement' seemed largely unnecessary, though.) Peter Kirk
threw himself wholeheartedly into the role of Rimbaud; Matthew Ward, Jerome Knox,
and Nicholas Morton, all proved convincing in their snatches of Britten, Auden,
and Isherwood. And so it went on: the students offered strong characterisation
as well as some fine singing. Indeed, I could not name a weak link in the cast.
As well as Les Illuminations,
extracts performed here in Britten’s own piano reduction, we also heard from four
Verlaine settings, Debussy’s Chevaux de
bois, Vaughan Williams’s The Sky
above the Roof, Fauré’s Spleen and
Une Sainte en son aureole, and
Britten’s The Journeying Boy (Hardy),
from which the play takes its name. The single performance sold out, but the
play will be performed again later in the year at the Guildhall School of Music.
A visit is heartily recommended, save to the readily-shockable Daily Mail brigade, for whom ‘language’
and tone might prove a little much.